When training in the graduated path to enlightenment (lamrim), Lama Zopa Rinpoche emphasizes that bodhichitta is most important.

In the video clip below, recorded during the Light of the Path 2016 retreat, Rinpoche notes that although bodhichitta as a topic appears quite late in the lamrim, in fact students should have a bodhichitta motivation for all their activities from the beginning. Even learning or meditating on the initial stages of the path, like guru devotion, should be done with a bodhichitta motivation, and so should all of every Dharma student’s daily activities. “You have to know that,” says Rinpoche.

That bodhichitta motivation is how students move toward enlightenment, Rinpoche explains, and how everything they do becomes a cause for freeing sentient beings from samsara. Rinpoche stresses that those teaching and studying lamrim need to make bodhichitta the emphasis at all times.